From the time I was a kid, I always knew something was going to happen to me. Didn’t know exactly what.

America is not nearly done. We’re only in the beginning. Who knows who we will be? Who knows… what color we will be? It is all something that, maybe, our descendants – if they survive that long – will see.

I set up situations that involve abandoning control and finding out what happens.

I always knew from that moment, from the time I found myself at home in that little segregated library in the South, all the way up until I walked up the steps of the New York City library, I always felt, in any town, if I can get to a library, I’ll be OK. It really helped me as a child, and that never left me.

I grew up in a very nice house in Houston, went to private school all my life and I’ve never even been to the ‚hood. Not that there’s anything wrong with the ‚hood.

I never smoked a cigarette until I was nine.

Early on, I was so impressed with Charles Dickens. I grew up in the South, in a little village in Arkansas, and the whites in my town were really mean, and rude. Dickens, I could tell, wouldn’t be a man who would curse me out and talk to me rudely.

God not only plays dice, He also sometimes throws the dice where they cannot be seen.

Why should I be studying for a future that soon may not exist?

At age nine, I got a paper route. Sixty-six papers had to be delivered to sixty-six families every day. I also had to collect thirty cents a week from each customer. I owed the paper twenty cents per customer per week, and got to keep the rest. When I didn’t collect, the balance came out of my profit. My average income was six dollars a week.

The innocence of childhood is like the innocence of a lot of animals.

When I was little… I didn’t relate to princesses. I saw Maleficent, and I just thought she was so – she was so elegant.

The uncertainty of parenting can bring up feelings in us that range from frustration to terror.

My comedy is different every time I do it. I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.

I grew up reading science fiction.

I had the most magical childhood, running free and going anywhere I wanted to in my head.

My life as a child did not prepare me for the fact that the world is full of cruel and bitter things.

Indecision may or may not be my problem.

Sixth grade was a big time, in my childhood, of hoops and friendship, and coming up with funny things.

With my childhood, it’s a wonder I’m not psychotic. I was the little Jewish boy in the non-Jewish neighborhood. It was a little like being the first Negro enrolled in the all-white school. I grew up in libraries and among books, without friends.

When I was a kid, I read the science-fiction shelves, and I read the fantasy shelves.

My entire childhood was steeped in poverty. For me, poverty, in a way, was the first inspiration of my life, a commitment to do something for the poor.

I hated to be treated as a child. I thought it was the worst situation.

I don’t know what ‚normal‘ means, anyway.

Green Eggs and Ham was the story of my life. I wouldn’t eat a thing when I was a kid, but Dr. Seuss inspired me to try cauliflower!

U2’s best work has always been when we didn’t know what we’re doing.

I used to live with my grandmother. I used to wonder why the other kids in school went home with their mothers and fathers. I wanted to be the guy that got married. I wanted to be the guy with the children and the white picket fence. I never had that.

As a kid, I got three meals a day. Oatmeal, miss-a-meal and no meal.

To this day, some of my closest friends say, ‚Gaga, you know, everything’s great. You’re a singer; your dreams have come true.‘ But, still, when certain things are said to you over and over again as you’re growing up, it stays with you and you wonder if they’re true.

Intuition and concepts constitute… the elements of all our knowledge, so that neither concepts without an intuition in some way corresponding to them, nor intuition without concepts, can yield knowledge.

I spent much of my childhood in northern Quebec, and often there was no radio, no television – there wasn’t a lot to entertain us. When it rained, I stayed inside reading, writing, drawing.

There are many things that I don’t understand.

My childhood was endless – from eight to 18 felt like hundreds of years.

When I was a little girl, I always dreamed of being a star. I didn’t really know what all that meant. I didn’t know.

I really had a lot of dreams when I was a kid, and I think a great deal of that grew out of the fact that I had a chance to read a lot.

A woman uses her intelligence to find reasons to support her intuition.

I come from a family of 12, so I kind of got a little lost as a child.

I’m not a marketing person. I don’t ask myself questions. I go by instinct.

It took me 40 years to write my first book. When I was a child, I was encouraged to go to school. I was not encouraged to follow the career of a writer because my parents thought that I was going to starve to death.

Scientific views end in awe and mystery, lost at the edge in uncertainty, but they appear to be so deep and so impressive that the theory that it is all arranged as a stage for God to watch man’s struggle for good and evil seems inadequate.

All thought must, directly or indirectly, by way of certain characters, relate ultimately to intuitions, and therefore, with us, to sensibility, because in no other way can an object be given to us.

Oh, I can spot a phoney a mile away.

I spent my childhood in the country and started reading even before going to school. There was nothing else in my life but sketching and reading.

Would you bet your paycheck on a weather forecast for tomorrow? If not, then why should this country bet billions on global warming predictions that have even less foundation?

My father… removed from Kentucky to… Indiana, in my eighth year… It was a wild region, with many bears and other wild animals still in the woods. There I grew up… Of course when I came of age, I did not know much. Still somehow, I could read, write, and cipher… but that was all.

I think that when we know that we actually do live in uncertainty, then we ought to admit it; it is of great value to realize that we do not know the answers to different questions. This attitude of mind – this attitude of uncertainty – is vital to the scientist, and it is this attitude of mind which the student must first acquire.

Certain though I am – and ever more certain – that I must press on in life as though Christ awaited me at the term of the universe, at the same time I feel no special assurance of the existence of Christ. Believing is not seeing. As much as anyone, I imagine, I walk in the shadows of faith.

I act on impulse and I go with my instincts.

I think kids are natural actors. You watch most kids; if they don’t have a toy, they’ll pick up a stick and make a toy out of it. Kids will daydream all the time.

Economic medicine that was previously meted out by the cupful has recently been dispensed by the barrel. These once unthinkable dosages will almost certainly bring on unwelcome after-effects. Their precise nature is anyone’s guess, though one likely consequence is an onslaught of inflation.

In such a porcelain life, one likes to be sure that all is well lest one stumble upon one’s hopes in a pile of broken crockery.

Sometimes, when I see my granddaughters make small discoveries of their own, I wish I were a child.

Years ago I met Richard Burton in Port Talbot, my home town, and afterwards he passed in his car with his wife, and I thought, ‚I want to get out and become like him‘. Not because of Wales, because I love Wales, but because I was so limited as a child at school and so bereft and lonely, and I thought becoming an actor would do that.

If you aren’t in the moment, you are either looking forward to uncertainty, or back to pain and regret.

If one does not know to which port one is sailing, no wind is favorable.

My first recollection is that of a bugle call.

I accept chaos, I’m not sure whether it accepts me.

I don’t know what can be so dangerous about giving people hope.

If someone is right for you, you’ll know it.

As a kid from Compton, you can get all the success in the world and still question your worth.

Change is always tough. Even for those who see themselves as agents of change, the process of starting a new thing can cause times of disorientation, uncertainty and insecurity.